Oliver Herbert Highlights Heitor Villa-Lobos

Late yesterday afternoon LIEDER ALIVE! concluded its 2022/23 season with one of its occasional ventures into instrumental chamber music. The featured soloist was cellist Oliver Herbert, performing with pianist Carlos Ágreda; and the featured composer was Heitor Villa-Lobos. That composer also accounted for the one vocal work on the program, which may well be his best known effort.

Soprano Esther Rayo joined Herbert and Ágreda for the first (“Ária”) movement of the fifth of the nine Bachianas Brasileiras compositions. This work was originally scored for soprano and an orchestra of cellos. However, Ágreda prepared an arrangement for the “current available resources;” and there was no faulting the engaging interplay among the three performers.

That trio concluded the first half of the program. The second half began with “O canto do cisne negro” (the song of the black swan) in the version for cello and piano. The duo then continued with the composer’s six-movement Pequena suíte. Since Villa-Lobos was, himself, a cellist, he gave three of those movements their first performance. Each of the movements was engaging on its own, but the sequence of six of them tended to be on the long side.

The first half of the program also featured a suite, which turned out to be performed under tragic circumstances. The suite was Paul Desenne’s four-movement Jaguar Songs, scored for solo cello and composed in 2002. However, after yesterday’s program went to press, the news reported that Desenne had died in Boston on May 20. This was announced through an insert in the program, which also included his own description of his suite. Herbert gave an engaging account of the diversity of dispositions that cut across those four movements, making the occasion a celebration of the composer’s life.

The remainder of the program consisted of shorter pieces. Two of these were arrangements by Ágreda of songs by composers that were totally unknown to me: Francisco Canaro and Germán Darío Pérez. My guess is that most of the audience shared my ignorance, and some background material in the program book would have been helpful. Nevertheless, one could appreciate the engaging dispositions of both cellist and pianist in their performances of these works. More familiar was the opening selection, Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion,” presumably an arrangement of music originally written for his tango orchestra.

Rayo returned for the encore selection. This was music that took me back to my now-distant childhood. “Estrellita” was composed by Manuel Ponce in 1912; but it was still a consistent favorite among musicians of the Fifties. It provided just the right complement to the opening Piazzolla selection as it reemerged from its own “oblivion.”

Taken as a whole, the program was an engaging journey of discovery through relatively unfamiliar repertoire. Given his efforts as an arranger, I would suspect that Ágreda had conceived the journey. However, all three of the performers made the listening experience entirely worthwhile.